VLC 2.0 has been released. "With faster decoding on multi-core, GPU, and mobile hardware and the ability to open more formats, notably professional, HD and 10bits codecs, 2.0 is a major upgrade for VLC. Twoflower has a new rendering pipeline for video, with higher quality subtitles, and new video filters to enhance your videos. It supports many new devices and BluRay Discs (experimental). Completely reworked Mac and Web interfaces and improvements in the other interfaces make VLC easier than ever to use. Twoflower fixes several hundreds of bugs, in more than 7000 commits from 160 volunteers."

I tried both the 32 and 64bit version on my iMac running 10.7.3, the cpu usage is 3x higher compared to the older version.
Looking a the comments on Macupdate.com, this problem has been consistent with all the Mac users. I wonder if the Linux and Windows users are having the same issue.